In these games players choose between actions that build up future potential and actions that expend resources to make immediate progress. The Deceptive Unimportance of Long Term ValueĪ common theme in European-style board games, like Dominion or Ticket to Ride, is managing potential vs kinetic energy. What Artifact appears to be about differs dramatically from what it’s actually about, making intuitive strategies incorrect. Issue 1: It’s Hard to Learn and Conceptually ConfusingĪ frequent complaint from Artifact players is that they don’t understand why they won or lost and don’t grasp how to improve. Plenty of people jumped every monetization hurdle and still quickly stopped playing the game. How they are wrong could be a blog post in itself, but even if they’re right (which, to be clear, they aren’t) the fact that the game has such an apparently punitive monetization model is a huge problem. That it’s not hard to “go infinite” and play forever without paying, or that the total cost of ownership is low. Some have argued that the monetization is fine or even generous. I once heard King of Fighters 95 described as one big fireball/uppercut experiment Artifact feels like one big monetization experiment, a Frankenstein’s Monster of monetization strategies. But to summarize Artifact includes four different monetization models: up front payment, paying for packs, a transaction fee on card sales, and a cost of entry for the big-boy modes. If you’ve heard any criticism of Artifact it’s probably this one, so I don’t think I need to elaborate much. This is a blog about design but it would be almost irresponsible to talk about Artifact’s failure without mentioning the monetization. And for the remainder of this piece I'll do my best to convince you that that's the case here. It fits the profile.įor this blog to have value you must accept that a game can have high apparent production value, a strong pedigree, and superficial indicators of quality while ultimately being no great shakes. I think there’s a strong temptation, especially among game developers, to look at the game from afar and declare that it’s a brilliant design because it looks like the kind of game for which that should be true. It has that good product look - the closest a card game has come to being a prestigious 3rd person sad dad simulator. It feels like a game made by smarties - people who did well on their SATs and went to Carnegie Mellon. I suspect some will reject this out of hand - much of the analysis I’ve seen online is “the game may have problems but you have to admit that it’s brilliantly designed!” The initial consensus was that design of the game is a strength and that it failed for vague reasons like “poor market fit.” (A trivial observation true for any product that underperforms) But I'd suggest something different: that Artifact looks like a well-designed game but isn't one.Īrtifact is clearly a professionally produced product. The simple version of my answer: it’s just not well-designed. Why a game in a popular genre, that appears competently made by a well-respected developer, landed with a quiet thud.
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